


we have both been here before

by younglegends



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored), Minor Character Death, Temporary Character Death, Video Game Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:08:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24035617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younglegends/pseuds/younglegends
Summary: You are growing stranger by the day.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	we have both been here before

You wake from an unsettling dream, one that leaves you sluggish, slow to react. Already its memory eludes you. An empty nothingness, set adrift in fog; a whisper. All of it falls away as the iron bars of the cell door rattle shut. A shadow slopes long and creeping against the wall. It watches you.

“From a friend,” it says, and leaves. 

The key is a clever glint of gold. It is cold in your hand, and weighs so little. The door opens for it, when it would not for you.

Outside the cell, there are mutters from your fellow inmates. A handful of coins on the table. A sword. 

They do not see you coming. 

You make it halfway across the prison yard before a guard raises his arm. He fires his pistol, and your chest bursts open, your vision whites out—

The world stutters. The guard is raising his pistol. He fires, and your chest—

The world stutters. The guard is raising his pistol. You lunge forward and cleave his arm from his body with the downward arc of your sword. He screams more in horror than pain, watching his gun clatter to the ground, clasped tight in the dead man’s grip of his severed hand, as though still trying to raise it, to fire. 

You run. 

Ears ringing from the blast of the explosives, diving down into the cold shock of water, you allow yourself to acknowledge what happened. Your body is weak from months of pain, torment, hunger: you are not yourself. Duty and diligence once sharpened your keen blade, but now you are the whetstone scraped raw. Even your own senses are failing you. They cannot be trusted. You focus your eyes forward through the murky water, and you leave the wreckage behind.

Deep in the sewers, you find your belongings carefully arranged. Somebody has gone through a lot of trouble for you, and wants you to know it. This is not a gift but the beginnings of a debt owed, one that will have to be paid in blood. Just as well—blood is all you have left. 

Your sword returns to you reluctantly. It recognizes you as someone once worthy of wielding it; scorns you for being that person no longer. The skeleton you have become, stripped of your duties, your purpose. Even your name, now a mockery of itself: _Royal Protector._ Here in the dark, amidst the muck of the sewers and the squeals of the rats, you pick up the pale gleam of its judgment once more.

Beyond the tunnels, out in the light of day, there is someone waiting for you. You get the distinct sense that he has been waiting for you for a very long time. “They said you’d come out here, but I can still hardly believe it,” he says. Still, he doesn’t look particularly surprised. His weathered face is grim, like he has seen a great deal more than this, and has only more to see. 

When you arrive, they drink to you, or to your promise. They smoke cigars and smile with teeth. The servants watch you: Lydia with disinterest, Wallace with disdain, Cecelia shooting furtive, curious glances she does not seem to think you notice. Callista is the only one to return your stare with a level regard; you are the first to look away. You slip around them in the hallways, enter strange rooms, leave the doors closed behind you. You are careful not to make a sound, though nothing here can harm you. You rifle through their shelves, trunks, private papers. You pocket stray coins. Even you can’t say why. Perhaps you are searching for some proof that you are really here; proof that you can keep. Perhaps you are only waiting for someone to catch you in the act. But nobody ever does. 

In the workshop, a man gives you a mask he has made for your face, despite having never met you in person before. It fits perfectly. You look out through the clarity of its lenses and think, at least now your senses cannot fail. You cannot fail.

In your sleep, you dream.

It is quiet, here in your dream. The world breaks off into pieces, set adrift in an empty nothingness, a hazy fog. Something whispers in a distant language, the murmur of waves against shore, washing up strange secrets from the depths. 

Haven’t you been here before—?

A shadow greets you like a friend.

“Hello, Corvo,” he says, and his black-eyed gaze is knowing. 

The mark sears itself into the back of your hand. It only hurts a little. The burn is what stays with you, singing through your skin as you move through air and sky, aglow with a pure light that leaves you cold. When you take hold of the beating heart he gives you, the mark shivers. It speaks. 

“This place is the end of all things,” she says, “and the beginning,” and you clench your fist around the sutured flesh, feel yourself weaken. You close your eyes.

“Know that I will be watching with great interest,” the Outsider says. He lets you go at last, though you doubt mercy has anything to do with it.

The heart is still there, when you awaken. So is the whalebone carving, laid thoughtfully on your bedside table, as though having watched vigil over you in the night. They whisper to you in voices none else can hear. They follow you, like a shadow, or a curse.

In the Distillery District, it rains. They are throwing bodies from the bridge. The roiling waters of the canal are the blue-black of a bruise. 

By the docks, you stray too far from the shadows and an officer catches your eye. You reach for your blade, but the next instant, he is turned away. A trick of the Watchtower’s inconstant light, revolving back and forth, there and gone again. You follow two paces behind its concentrated beam and leave the officer gazing out over the pier; you have no wish to press your luck. 

In a derelict house that has long outlived itself, an old lady speaks as though not to you but to something through you, her pearly gaze always fixed ever so slightly above your shoulder. Her rewards do not interest you—more fragments of bone, sigils carved through to the marrow. Still, you find yourself fulfilling her petty grudges: stabbing strangers in the back, poisoning clear-running elixirs with foul viscera. None of it concerns you. There is not even the satisfaction of a job well done. This is how low you have sunk—creeping with the rats in the shadows, crouching on rooftops and pipes. Watching this city from a distance with worthless blood on your hands. 

Then again, perhaps this is all you have always done, and all you can do: follow the orders of others, detached from the tangle of their needs and wants. A blade to slice neatly through the coil. 

After all, what _you_ need—what you want—

The Office of the High Overseer awaits. 

“Are you ready to go?” Samuel asks, cigar in hand, and you do not tell him that you fell from a light fixture outside the High Overseer’s meeting chamber and felt the unmistakable crack of a rib, only to find yourself perched back up above the glowing white bulbs a moment later, nothing but a faint phantom ache inside the hollow of your chest. You do not tell him that you were caught exchanging the wineglasses and Curnow himself struck you down, and from the ground you saw Campbell raise his sword unseen at Curnow’s back with a sneer on his face, but when you blinked the wineglasses were standing upright before you once more, no longer shattered from the pistol shots, the two men only a distant murmur down the hallway outside. You do not tell him that a hound closed its jaw around your ankle, that a guard rang the alarm on you twice, that you tasted the steel of a blade. Above all, you do not tell him that all these things never happened, leaving your body unscathed, the bonecharms weighing down your pockets like stones. 

You can tell him none of this, so you say nothing at all. 

Drops of rain fall against your mask. You cannot feel them on your skin, but you know they are there. 

It is Callista who greets you at the docks with an uncomplicated happiness you are ashamed to have not thought her capable of. Even as she thanks you, the heart tries to impart you her secrets, none of which manage to surprise you more than her own quiet admission, freely given: “I feel hope.” 

A word you have forgotten the sound of. Surely it does not seem so misplaced, here in the sunlight, among allies. As she speaks the others are poring over the encoded pages of Campbell’s journal, in search of Emily’s name. Somehow, you have no doubt that she will be found. But this certainty feels different from hope. 

Down in the sewer tunnels, you dispatch the weepers with an efficient hand, not wishing to prolong their suffering. You cannot help but feel that there is something about them to be pitied. They have no choice but to wander like ghosts through the worlds they once knew, so you grant them the rest they deserve. After all, you are the only one who can.

The Golden Cat is no place for a child. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and callous gossip, choked by vines of creeping ivy. Behind curtains and closed doors come muffled noises of pain and pleasure, and it is difficult to tell the difference. Still, you find traces of her with your experienced eye: an overturned plate of fruit, a doll-like figurine made from strips of fabric and cushion stuffing, the faint shape of teeth marks circling a guard’s wrist in a ring of angry red. _LADY EMILY KALDWIN_ is written in a slanted crayon scrawl on the underside of a table; the _LADY_ is crossed out and replaced with _EMPRESS,_ like an afterthought _._ All these clues left in a deliberate trail of breadcrumbs, as though another game of hide-and-seek, one she is expecting you to win. 

Morgan goes down in a hissing burst of steam, Custis cut open and leaking red onto the plush silk bedsheets. It takes four tries for your sword to manage to slit his throat before he can scream for the guards. Flashes of déjà vu, you dismiss them, and ignore how he seems to react sharper each time, a savage hatred carving deeper and deeper into his face, already dead behind the eyes. Emily runs childlike into your arms, but you can tell she is growing up by the way she does not pretend to have not noticed the blood on your blade. 

On the boat, huddled together for warmth, she is quieter than you remember. You had thought she would have questions: _What did you do? Where are we going? What will happen to us now?_ Instead she looks out over the waters with a serene expression beyond her years, out of place on her youthful face. As though the answers lie all around in the expanse that surrounds you both; the fate that keeps the two of you afloat. 

Emily has awakened something in you. Her presence reminds you of who you should be. Whose shoulder you were supposed to stand beside. Your own potential flickers in you like a fire, cruel in its imagined warmth, and when the others herald you for your successes, you hear failure.

You are trying. For her, you are trying. You flit past watchful eyes, exchange your crossbow bolts for sleeping darts, avoid open windows and private rooms. But it is so hard, when you sprain and unsprain an ankle on a bad fall; when a weeper lunges snarling at your face and then lies suddenly crumpled under the blade you do not remember having raised; when a thug offers you gratitude for unlocking his cell, then shoots you the instant you turn your back. You cannot fault him for it. He must have already known it was going to end this way: you standing over his body as he bleeds out into the gutter, the bullet in your back returned to the cradle of his gun, as surely as if it had never flown. 

You should be getting better at this, by now, but it only gets worse. The guards turn around at the wrong moment, breaking pattern, possessed by a muscle memory that should not exist. Searchlights single out your path as though it has been laid out with string on a map. And the rats. The rats follow in your wake, teeming and monstrous and hungry for all the bodies you have to leave behind. 

Everything is wrong, and yet everything goes right. You begin to suspect that you are the problem. Months locked up in the dark, kept apart from the world, and now you have forgotten its nature. Perhaps it has always been like this. Perhaps the blood you spill is only necessary. Inevitable, even. The same way you do not consciously intend to seek out the remnants of bone scattered throughout the city, but they find you anyway. They glow in the periphery of your vision. They beckon.

“He could stand to be a bit more interesting,” the Outsider says with the stale air of a script, but it’s you he watches. He expects from you a good show, though you can’t tell if he is enjoying it so far. From atop Kaldwin’s Bridge, it all looks the same to you: dark, and distant, and lonely. 

Different versions of Anton Sokolov greet you in his safehouse. One who makes a run for the door; one who calls for the guards; one who splits his forehead open on the tabletop when you knock him out. The one you are left with lies safely unconscious at your feet, something like a weary patience in his gaze as you crushed the breath from his throat. You wonder if he will be able to fix the visions that plague you, the peculiar affliction that no one else seems to notice. He tells you to go to a party instead.

Cecelia informs you of a secret retreat in an abandoned apartment she seems overly certain will be of use to you. Callista spends all her time with Emily, as though she fears there will not be enough of it. Havelock is pleased with your progress, but there is an uneasiness to the way he watches you, brow furrowed like he has forgotten something, or is only just remembering it. 

Over the Boyle Estate, there are fireworks. 

_Lydia Boyle,_ you guess, and the lady in white shakes her head.

“How disappointing. You’ll just have to play again—”

 _Lydia Boyle,_ you guess, and the lady in black shakes her head. 

“How disappointing. You’ll just have to play again—”

 _Lydia Boyle,_ you guess, and the lady in red shakes her head.

“Took you long enough, didn’t it?” she says, and her voice is awfully pitying. 

Her bared throat seems impatient for your blade. She falls gracefully backward onto the piano as though completing the steps of a dance. Blood on the ivory keys. 

You don’t remember signing the guestbook, but your name is already there. Outside, in the yard, lies a dead man who witnesses will forget drew his pistol first. Bits of charred flesh are scattered by the Wall of Light, and for some reason, you think they belong to you. 

You feel sick. You blame it on the debauchery, the wasted coin and spoiled fruit, the pigs’ heads served eyeless on silver plates. Or it could be the cruel delight of the masked crowd that scarcely seems to notice the undercurrent of threat in the air, let alone their missing host. The stench of death mingling with their perfume. As though blood and violence are only expected guests of honour, fashionably late and the life of the party, here in the lap of corrupted luxury. Laughter rings; you suspect you are the joke. You think you should leave. 

“Enjoy your evening, sir?” Samuel asks. The words are polite, his tone less so. You would call it uncharitable, but you cannot think of how you have wronged him. Not yet. 

Havelock and Martin do not look you in the eye. They seem tense, poring over their maps, searching for something beyond their grasp. Callista is agitated; Piero, distracted. The servants whisper to one another out of earshot like ghosts. Emily is the only one who appears unconcerned. She gives you a gift from the riverbank. “For luck,” she says, a faint smile on her lips at the irony. She knows you do not need it. 

You are growing stranger by the day. You can see through walls, blast gales of wind, bloom frothing swarms of rats like flowers. Even time slows its steady hand for you, or for the whalebones carried in your pockets, sewed into the seams. You thrum with a power you do not possess, but the other way around: you can feel it inside you like a living thing, the same way you crawl into the hearts of others and steer their stolen bodies. It lies in wait, pulsing beneath the poor fit of your skin, as though you are merely the vessel it fills. As though you are just another crude relic stitched of bone and blood, crafted by the Outsider’s own loving hand. 

“How will you end his reign,” he asks you now. “By blood or by truth?”

But he looks at you as if he already knows the answer; as if it is written inside.

In the courtyard, the arches of the gazebo stand solemn. You cannot help but linger, though you are not here to mourn, though the relentless pull of the tower in the distance urges you on. _IN MEMORY OF HER MAJESTY JESSAMINE KALDWIN._ Here she lies. You place a gloved hand over the marble plaque, the earth beneath. Cold to the touch. You try to remember: has she ever been anything else but this? A memory; a name?

“We have both been here before,” the heart intones, and you have the familiar sinking feeling that she means more than she tells.

You can think of immeasurable ways for the Lord Regent to die, a thousand soft places on his body in which to sink your blade. A drop down from the rafters to crack his skull against stone. A white-hot explosion of whale oil from the tank of his own tallboy patrol. A springrazor laid in his path to lace his organs through with shrapnel. It does not matter. Nowhere is safe. He cannot stop you. He must feel you coming now, inevitable as the shadow that follows at his feet. He paces back and forth in his safehouse and mutters to himself through gnashing teeth: not rambling plans for the future but his own past mistakes, as though trying to pinpoint the moment it all began to unravel. The turns that led him here, cornered into a trap of his own making, waiting for you to come collect. Because even he must know you will not be denied. 

But in the end you decide that it is a far more fitting punishment for his confessions to be broadcast through the city, for his own guards to lock him up in the same prison he left you in, for him to rot with the rats he is responsible for. At least, that is what you intend. On your way into the tower you had rewired every Wall of Light for convenience, and when the guards lead him in shackles down the hallway, they all go up in a clean burst of incandescent white. Their blood evaporates in a crackling hiss of heat. Their cells ignite. 

You half-expect the world to stutter, to knit bone and sinew back together, to leave the puppets standing poised on their strings. It doesn’t. The smell of burnt flesh remains; the seconds, the minutes tick on. The Lord Regent is gone for good. His end feels more bitter than sweet. It was quicker than he deserved; he did not pay his price; it was not your choice. 

But whose was it, then?

In a secret room carved out from inside the walls, you read the elegant script. _My heart is at peace._ In your hand, its silence tells a different story. It tells you that you must go on.

Samuel excuses himself from the pub, not looking terribly ruffled at having to miss the celebrations. “I’ll be seeing you,” he had said, and seemed sure of it. Everyone else is gathered together, glasses raised, grins frozen on their faces. Callista looks at you with a weary, dignified endurance to her posture, and does not say a word. Emily sketches portraits, crayons scratching furiously against paper; a magnificent city is taking shape on the page, veiled in smoke and shadow, smothering all the tiny faceless people within. It looks familiar, though you do not like to look at it too long. From whom, you wonder, did she inherit this gift for prophecy?

Havelock’s eyes are distant; they flick nervously back and forth as though retracing routes on a map, searching even now for some way out, some escape. Pendleton snivels with near-incoherent praise in a last-ditch attempt to curry favour, made all the more pathetic by the fact that there is no one left to give it to him. Only Martin stands still, though his hands shake. His face haggard, pale as a corpse. Prepared to see this through. 

You wonder what it is they see when they look at you, that scares them so. A mirror, perhaps. A blankness in which to reflect their own wretched selves: what they’ve always done, and what they’ll always do, and what will always, in the end, be done. 

You return their empty gazes. You lift the glass to your lips, and you drink. 

You drift. 

The unsteady rock of a boat. A hazy fog. An empty nothingness that surrounds you; a whisper.

Your hand glides through the clear waters, trailing ripples in your wake.

You remember something, you think—

“I know a great deal, bodyguard,” says Daud, and you’re inclined to believe him when he drops you in a rathole with your left hand still attached to your wrist, not even a lock or chain to hold you at bay, bricks conveniently placed at your feet to break the wooden slats above. When he methodically strips you of your weapons but leaves you your mask. 

His assassins flit in and out of existence as though barely even real. You tear your way through them with their own ammunition, looted from the bodies that stare unseeing from the vacant eyes of their gas masks. None can touch you, not the whalers nor the weepers in the refinery gouging at your eyes, but under the flooded streets, deep inside a submerged apartment, your breath runs out. You drown with limbs clumsy and slow in the water, the stairwells upside down and leading nowhere, the stained paintings leering at you from the walls. You emerge on a rooftop, perfectly dry, choking on the abundance of air suddenly overflowing your throat, and it haunts you far more than any wound. You stay clear of the waters after that.

Daud is not surprised to see you when you arrive, nor when your blade finds its way through his armour, sinking past bone and into muscle. He only sighs, like this is what he has been waiting for all this time. He dies with his eyes closed, and it unnerves you, that he who deserves it least is the one who gets what he wants most. 

On the floor above, you play the audiograph. His final words echo across the room, his body not yet cold on the ground. Your fist clenches by your side. 

Remorse is for the weak. For the dead. Not you, though you have been shot and stabbed and cracked across the cobblestones of Dunwall from railings and rooftops, torn to pieces by rats and weepers alike, betrayed a hundred times over. And over. 

The city is barely more than rubble, at this point; there are more rats than survivors, feasting on what remains, growing fat on the meat of the world. Only old pages torn from books are left to tell you the rich histories that used to inhabit these abandoned houses, tales and traditions and private thoughts penned in journal entries. Was this really once a place in which anyone lived? You have grown used to the death that clogs up the streets, a little too accepting, perhaps, like you have never known them any other way. You seem more at ease in movement as a scavenger, lurking unseen over the bones of the city and picking them clean, than you would with a face; with a name. 

In the sewers, you end a man’s life before he can do the honours himself. You free Slackjaw, another rat running back to his ruined kingdom, and you throw Granny Rags’ cameo into the fire, the years burning from her like layers of dust, peeling back from wrinkled skin. Even as she fades you sense that she’ll be back before long, a parasite preying upon the world that can’t be shaken off, that bides its time like old, precious treasure. 

“Strange how there’s always a little more innocence to lose,” the Outsider says silkily. “And Daud. You just killed the greatest assassin of the age. Do you even know why?”

He had it coming. There was no other choice. It was what you wanted. Wasn’t it? 

You do not respond.

The Outsider hums a strange little tune. Something inside you aches at the sound of it. You did not know he was capable of song. It has been so long since there was something you did not know. 

“The choice is yours,” says Piero; a gracious offering, but Sokolov is conspicuously silent. He has yet to lie to you, after all. You tell them what they need to hear, and the light arcs over the rooftops, a halo of divine judgment that strikes down every living thing like lightning. The scorch marks seared into the ground are all that remains. Those, and the trace of ozone in the air. The sizzling stench of meat.

There are bodies wrapped up by the docks. You scrounge up personal effects: Lydia, nothing; Wallace, a last lie; Callista, a key. You are grateful that you cannot see their faces. 

Samuel comes when he is called. He seems to resent this. He raises his lantern and peers closely at you through its shifting light, as though searching for somebody else inside you, a different face behind the mask. But he sees what you have left behind, in the smoke that once was the Hound Pits Pub, and he lowers the lamp, once more inscrutable in the dark. 

“I knew you’d be back, Corvo.” He says your name pointedly; an insult? A verdict? A reminder? You answer to it all the same, climbing into his boat one last time. Now only the waters lie between what you are and what you will be, reflecting yourself back up at you in its surface, blurred and indistinct and shattering apart in the rain. 

Kingsparrow Island is an ominous shadow rising out of the water. An ugly creature that watches as you approach, contorted into a cruel, hard shape, each searchlight one of its thousand glaring eyes. 

“I’ve seen a lot, traveling with you,” Samuel says as his boat docks the two of you at shore. The rain crashes down against you both. “I don’t like what you’ve become.”

You can’t help but wonder if he ever liked you at all. After all, you’ve never met the man as anyone else. From where is he feeling such surprise? Disappointment? What right does he have, to judge? 

“That’s why I’m gonna tell them you’re coming,” he says, and he raises his pistol into the sky—

Kingsparrow Island is an ominous shadow rising out of the water. The rain crashes down against you both.

“I don’t like what you’ve become,” Samuel says as his boat docks the two of you at shore. “That’s why I’m gonna tell them you’re coming—”

Kingsparrow Island is an ominous shadow rising out of the water. 

“That’s why I’m gonna tell them you’re coming,” Samuel says, and he raises his pistol into the sky—

You are trying to save him, some part of you realizes. You are trying to leave him alive. 

But his gaze is unflinching. Unforgiving. He raises his pistol into the sky, every time, his own last lighthouse signal. He is waiting for you to do the necessary thing. As you have always done.

You do not let him down. Not this time. You leave his body in the boat, your face streaked wet with more than rain. You’ve never met the man as anyone else. From where are you feeling such surprise? Shame? What right do you have, to regret?

The island is being eaten away by the sea. Men crowd every inch of it like maggots on flesh. Whale oil spits from arc pylons; guards turn on one other in paranoia. You die by blade, by bullet, by electricity stripping the meat from your bones. And yet you cannot die, though the rats watch you with greedy eyes like they remember how you taste. You flicker through rooftops and empty rooms; your second sight slides black over your eyes so you can see through to the core of this constructed place, dismantle its skeleton of machinery and wiring. Your blood sings down the vein. Not in victory or triumph, but the macabre hiss of something alive, something undead, something that wants to break free. 

They are all already dead. They have always already been dead. Martin, who speaks to you with the bullet hole still smoking from his skull; Pendleton who bled out long before you or he ever got here, laughter on his lips as the rats drink him dry. Havelock awaits you at the top of the lighthouse, for there is nowhere else he could be—nowhere else for him to go. He holds Emily close in his grip, even as he seems to recoil from her in a deep-set horror, how she stands straight-backed and imperial, all dressed in white. So bright she shines through the storm. Though she screams at him to unhand her, though she calls for you, it is strange: she does not look scared at all. 

“Go ahead and do it,” Havelock shouts over the roaring thunder, and the bolt misses, and he stumbles backward, and they both plunge over the edge—

“Go ahead and do it,” Havelock shouts over the roaring thunder, and the bolt hits him in the eye, and he plunges backward over the edge with Emily, who stares straight at you the whole way down—

“Go ahead and do it,” Havelock shouts over the roaring thunder, and he seems frozen in relief when you finally do, time melting slow and thick, all the colours leaching away. Every one of you rendered, at last, the exact same bloodless shade of grey. Havelock’s throat opens wide under your blade; you wrench Emily from his grasp before her dress can get stained. When you return him to his time, he falls into it without having to be pushed. The sea swallows him up, and it is as though he was never was.

Emily embraces you; in your arms, her body is small and cold and hard. An unshivering thing. She clasps your hand, the one drawn into a fist, and watches the light fade from the cracks of the mark in fascination. You don’t like the look on her face, not curiosity but anticipation. Something like hunger.

“You’re my hero,” she tells you, and you cannot tell if it is meant to be consolation, or command. The lines of her face are carved like those of a statue in the darkness, in the harsh light of the lamps. “Take us home, Corvo.” 

The rain lashes down around you, seared bone-white in flashes of lightning. The wind howls. Beneath your feet, the world is a wound gaping open. It is only a matter of time before the infection sets in. It is already too late. You cannot explain the thought that lands heavy in your mind: _but Empress, we already are._

“What will history tell us?” the Outsider says, and does not seem to expect an answer.

You cannot tell who this speech is for. Surely not you, not with his grand sweeping gestures, his language too vague and impersonal to capture the precise weight of what you have been through. What you have done. Here in the hollow vacuum of time and space, just who is he speaking to? Who are his words meant to touch? 

“But whether the stories told mention you by name, she will remember—”

“Enough,” you interrupt.

Your voice is hoarse. When was the last time you used it? 

The Outsider pauses. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that everything pauses.

“My dear Corvo. Did you say something?”

“It’s over.” Your throat is ragged. “It’s the end. You can stop. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It could very well be the end,” he agrees. “Unless, of course...”

You are tired. You have no more patience for mystery, for the meaningless games of a god. Even the heart is slowing in your hand, as though falling into a deep slumber, glacial as ice. 

The Outsider, on the other hand, looks as though he is only just beginning to pay attention. He peers at you intently, eyes glinting black like beetles.

“Unless you are not satisfied?”

You say nothing. 

The Outsider moves closer. Something has changed. A shift in the air, though there is no wind here, only an absence of warmth. Of everything. Gone is the grandiosity with which he always spoke to you in the past, as though delivering a sermon at one of his countless shrines, answering someone else’s prayer. Now he seems young and old at once, both the new inquisitiveness of his boyish body and the ancient, deep-stirring interest of the thing inside it. 

“Unless there was something else you wanted?” 

You close your eyes. You hold your breath. You do not move, though you know: you have already given yourself away. 

The silence stretches between you, across the whole of the Void, a tangible string suspended by its own gravity.

The Outsider reaches out, and plucks it. 

In your hand, the heart flutters awake. It starts to beat once more, slow and rhythmic, a clockwork sound.

“Well, there’s nothing to it, then,” the Outsider says; it is almost a sigh. “One more time.”

He leans in closer, then, his murmur cool as the fire of an elixir down your throat.

“Let’s see if we can do better.”

You wake from an unsettling dream, one that leaves you sluggish, slow to react. Already its memory eludes you. An empty nothingness, set adrift in fog; a whisper. All of it falls away as the iron bars of the cell door rattle shut. A shadow slopes long and creeping against the wall. It watches you.

“From your friend,” it says, and leaves. 

The key is a clever glint of gold.

They do not see you coming.

**Author's Note:**

> _let's see if we can do better_ is, of course, from the [cinematic trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeIn3WjbVbw), but also [this piece of fanart](https://lokorum.tumblr.com/post/187026579714/its-2019-and-the-2012-dishonored-trailer), which was very much in my mind as i wrote this.


End file.
